Ikea Hack – Bookshelf Unit, Part 1

PLANNING:

Yesterday I was over at my sisters house. She has been working really hard recently on decorating, de-cluttering and generally removing the ravages of children over the years. She has a sitting room with a newly installed woodburner, (she enlarged the fireplace and taught herself how to lime plaster to help install this, bravo!), and her style is very boho. Lots of indian/ethnic furniture, kilims, fabulous battered leather armchairs and artefacts. The room is skinny with a low ceiling, and not much natural light, so it ends up like a tunnel with dead space at either end.

There are two very long alcoves either side of the fireplace, and one is very underused – in fact it is crying out for something more. So I suggested some sort of storage combination so she can get all of her stuff like LP’s, DVD’s, books etc into one dedicated place. Budget is an issue, and we always like to get creative and avoid shelling out a fortune where possible. So I came up with an idea for an IKEA hack that we will be making this week. Here are some very fuzzy images of the room and alcove, apologies for the quality!

Using an extended KALLAX as a central piece and two Billy bookcases either side, plus wood mouldings to revamp the front areas and to create some grandeur, we should be able to come up with a lovely break-front bookcase that will store a huge amount of things, fingers crossed! As the room has generally dark furniture we are going to use white Ikea units, but paint the backs of the shelves in a dark grey to highlight whatever ends up on the shelves. We will also paint everything else in white once the mouldings are attached.

The KALLAX units comes with great square baskets available made in rattan and palm leaves, so in some shelves clutter can be hidden in these.

SHOPPING LIST:

So here are the basics we will be buying:

Two skinny Billy Bookcases

One central Kallax unit

One Kallax to add on top of the fiest one for the central section

Mouldings will be detailed with vertical rises like this:

And the top pediment moulding like this:

The base will also have a small skirting added to finish off the piece:

So we have measured up, and this week we will start the project. If all goes well we should have a rather nice bookcase. Here are some ideas I used as inspiration, all are IKEA hacks and I think they look pretty amazing:

So off to IKEA now for some shopping and I will post more as the project develops this week.

Update 2 days later:

Mitred corners, aaahhhhh! Bane of my life but the hack should be ready in a couple of days